Commentary: When will the Sixers learn?

PHILADELPHIA — The most ridiculous night of recent 76ers basketball began and ended the same way. It began and ended with the ignoring of seven feet and 285 pounds of the obvious.

That’s the way it’s been since training camp, and that’s how it is going to end soon — too soon for the Sixers to pickpocket a playoff spot. But that was the organization’s risk when it traded for Andrew Bynum, a talented if reputedly motivation-challenged center. And that’s the way it was Tuesday, before, during and long after the Sixers were blasted by a 15-win team, at home, churning a losing streak to six.

Everyone involved was allowing Bynum not to establish position in the lane, but to establish an atmosphere of indifference. Try that around any basketball team and see how it works.

Not that he was obligated, but Bynum was informally scheduled to meet with the press sometime before the game to discuss the knee miseries that have kept him from every game this season. But when he didn’t show, the Sixers announced that they weren’t able to produce him on time. And not that he could have provided anything more than professional dignity, but Bynum was not even on the bench in plain clothes to suffer the Sixers’ 98-84 loss to the Orlando Magic. Afterward, Doug Collins said he wasn’t aware of whether Bynum was, wasn’t or was even expected there.

He’s making close to $16.9 million this season. Being there shouldn’t be an imposition, particularly when a Sixers spokesman assured that he was on the premises — not that he was seen after the game. And after the media was told that he would be available at practice Wednesday, that practice was canceled.

Bynum likely wouldn’t have said much, anyway — not before the game, not after, not at practice Wednesday, not on Boxing Day in Canada. But his words, whines and whispers no longer matter. What matters is that no one hanging from the Sixers’ supervisory ladder is in any mood to hold him to any particular schedule. It is their fault, not just his.

That trouble began when the marketing magicians who rented the confetti machines and videotaped an orchestra playing the national anthem over-sold their acquisition of Bynum with a downtown pep rally. He wasn’t even as complete a player as Andre Iguodala, who was with the Olympic Dream Team, one of the two best basketball sides ever assembled. Yet the Sixers did everything but throw shoes at their Wilt statue, lasso it down and erect a Bynum model on that very spot.

From there, everything the club would do concerning Bynum would be to justify that carry-on. So how was Bynum to have interpreted that any way but that he was bigger than the organization?

As for Collins, he had been cruelly accused while as a player of over-stating the pain from multiple injuries. So even now, he will not pressure any player to return from an injury. “Can’t do that,” he has said, sometimes even before the question could be completed. “Can’t do that.” Doug being Doug.

By Tuesday, the failed Bynum initiative was reaching the absurd. The Sixers would trot through a horrid loss, then be blasted by Collins, who was careful to include himself in a rant that would rate just below a certain we’re-talking-about-practice pip once unloaded at the same site. And yet no one — not a player, a coach, the owner, the president, the G.M. — was openly pushing Bynum to either speed his recovery or, at least, to show some interest in the game-night goings-on.

But it’s probably over anyway. The Sixers are 22-33, as of Wednesday last in their division. Even if they begin to improve Thursday in Chicago, they will be haunted by the reality that 12 of their final 16 games will be on the road. By then, if Bynum plays, it will be only to audition for a new contract.

His schedule, again.His agenda, always.

At least Collins is showing his displeasure with losing. But that’s what can happen when players learn early that indifference will be tolerated. And that’s what will happen when they find out the same thing late.